


Five men who changed Natasha's life and the one who made her human

by Katefkndoes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Underage Sex, not as dark as it sounds, not graphic, vague mentions of winter soldier plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 06:08:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1376689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katefkndoes/pseuds/Katefkndoes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots of Natasha's life, before and after working with SHIELD.</p><p>(Did I mention that I'm not good at summaries?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five men who changed Natasha's life and the one who made her human

**Lev Terekhov**

She was barely a woman when Lev made his move.  He was another ‘Red Room’ subject, although thankfully, he wasn’t nearly as well-versed in their teachings as she was.  He stood maybe a foot taller, and had a handful of years on her – back when a few years still seemed like a lifetime.  His dark hair fell over his steel-grey eyes, and she considered him handsome in the traditional sense of the word.  However, there was something unsettling about the twisted smirk that marred his still boyish features, which reminded her of a predator lying within.  And next to her small form, he cast an intimidating shadow, even in the brightest of rooms. 

It was late one night, maybe four hours after lights out, when he found his way into the small cell she called her quarters.  She woke to the feel of his hot breath on her neck, the smell of their shared supper now nothing more than a putrid stench.  Even in the darkness, she saw that smirk toying with the corners of his lips, and it made her skin crawl though she wasn’t sure why. 

She had been in training since she was five-years-old and couldn’t remember her life before.  But with that came with a certain naivety of the nature of humanity, and at first she had not comprehended what he expected of her.

Physical contact was, of course, prohibited between pupils, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t sneak the odd touch here and there.  Initially, that was what she thought he wanted, but she’d never been particularly affectionate, and she didn’t appreciate the contact.  In her innocence, she assumed that he had risked a week in solitude – or worse – for a mere hug.  However, when he thrust his big hand down her loose fitting pants, she finally understood.  She was thirteen years old, and already a target of unwanted sexual attention.

When the guards came rushing in to locate the source of the screams, they found Lev unconscious, pinned to the ground by Natasha’s expertly trained, if still skinny, thighs.  They dragged him away – she had never seen him again – but no one ever asked if she was okay. 

Nonetheless, it proved to be a learning experience.  She went to bed that night as a naïve child, and woke up a jaded woman.  It was the beginning of her transformation into the Black Widow.

 

**The Winter Soldier**

Yasha was unlike anyone else she had ever worked with.  

Traditionally, when female agents reached a certain level of both maturity and competency they were referred to him - one final test to prove that they were ready for field work.  At fifteen she was the youngest subject to be sent to him, he was at least ten years older, but no one seemed to see a problem in that.

She’d heard stories from the older girls who had been sent to him; they all came back changed.  The scars weren’t always physical, but she was perceptive enough to take note of their existence anyway.  As long as the trainees could still do their jobs, apparently, the instructors had no problem with the Soldier’s methods of education.

The whispers told her that he was cold, unfeeling and soulless, which was precisely why he always got the job done.  They called him beautiful, like a fallen angel.  And they said that he fucked like he killed – without mercy.  He didn’t take prisoners, and that attitude was what he was supposed to teach them.

When he threw her down, she kept getting right back up again, fighting like she had nothing to lose.  She no longer feared death.  She had been trained that failure was worse.  He told her that she reminded him of someone he used to know – but they both new that wasn’t true.  He remembered precisely what they wanted him to remember, and if they had to, they would do the same to her.  He was as much of a prisoner as she was.  Nothing more than a blunt instrument in a war he didn’t really understand.

While others fell into bed with him out of necessity, – some misplaced assumption that he would go easy on them if they did; - she went to bed with him because she wanted to – needed to really.  Two years of training and she wanted more, she wanted to continue their dance, to take it to the next level, and he was more than happy to oblige.  They were equals, and it had been a long time since either of them had experienced that balance.  He showed her what little affection he could, and she returned in kind. 

A desperate love affair that was doomed to fail.  They fought, they killed and they fucked.  Such was their relationship.  But he helped her survive – taught her to feel slightly more like the human she wasn’t.

 

**Klaus Amsel**

He was her first solo mission.  His once blond hair had long since lightened to a grey-white and the paunch at his stomach seemed to grow with every mouthful of champagne.  They wanted him dead, but not before they had coerced him into detailing his plans.  Her masters – because her life was practically one of indentured servitude, fighting until she had cleared her insurmountable debts – disliked his interest in their affairs, and they needed to know exactly what he planned to do about it.

If it had been left to her, she would have forced the information out of him the old fashioned way, but they had other ideas.  They sent her because she was ‘young and buxom,’ and had been partnered with the Soldier – their deadliest assassin - longer than anyone else.  She was the best.  Though, perhaps more importantly, she held no illusions of escape since she had no memories of a better life, and had managed to give them the impression that she was okay with executing whatever order they issued. 

The man, old enough to be her grandfather, was practically salivating from the moment they were introduced, his eyes pointed exclusively towards her ample cleavage.  She played her role to perfection; laughed at all his stupid little anecdotes and let him believe that she was genuinely attracted to him.  When he trailed his hand down her cheek she didn’t flinch or turn away, and when he headed to his room, she followed as though he was giving her exactly what she wanted.  The arrogance of the man was astonishing.

They kissed, she allowed him to strip her to her underwear, and moaned when he kissed her neck.  She even reached between his legs with one hand, as he forced his weight upon her, and pricked him in the neck with the needle she had been concealing with the other.  Mercifully, the drug was fast acting, and she merely had to force his, not-inconsiderable, dead weight off her to complete her mission.

She stripped his apartment, and collected everything of significance.  Then, and only then, did she dress herself with shaking fingers.  She left no trace of their encounter behind but she took the marks of it with her.

She realized as she shut the door behind her, that sometimes sex was just business.

 

**Clint Barton**

Clint Barton was her mark, and as it turned out, she was his.

She was tasked with disabling him, but even she wasn’t capable of taking down a government agent in the middle of a heavily guarded peace summit.  By then, her codename was infamous even among foreign circles, but that was of little consequence to her.

So, that night, her name was Valentina Zhdanova and her plan was to seduce him, take him back to a room, and get rid of him for good.  But when she arrived in his room, she discovered the problem with her plan.

He was a nice guy, and not unattractive, which alone would not have been enough to prevent her from completing her objective.  However, when he looked her dead in the eye, called her Natasha, and asked her if she had ever wanted more from her life, it was enough to stop her in her tracks.  Up until that point, no one had ever asked her if she wanted something else, she had been part of the ‘red room’ for as long as she could remember, and she was one of their most talented agents.  There were not a lot of options for women with as much red in their ledgers as she had accumulated.

When she let out a silent tear, he didn't shout and he wasn’t angry, he merely drew her to him in the first real hug of her life.  One thing her upbringing had taught her was to be suspicious of people who seemed friendly, because up until then there had always an ulterior motive behind their actions.  But when she looked at Clint she couldn't see anything but an open-honestly with which she was startlingly unfamiliar.

Naturally, she had panicked.

She leant over to kiss him, because that was what her training told her to do.  He allowed her to complete the action, but when he pulled back to look at her, a small crease formed between his eyebrows, and he asked her if that was what she wanted.  The question threw her for a loop, and it must have shown on her face, because when he suggested that she was probably working for the wrong people, she had no retort.

In many ways, Clint Barton rescued her.  And if nothing else, he certainly taught her that she always had the right to disagree with orders, that she was more than a mindless weapon.

 

**Tony Stark**

Working for SHIELD had its perks, and one of those was the freedom to approach a situation as she saw fit.  There was something incredibly satisfying about winding up a genius, with an ego as big as his bank balance.  Hell, even Fury had gotten a kick out of her actions.  And it was a genuine pleasure for her to admit that she actually liked her commander.

Flirting with Stark was so easy that it was almost hilarious.  And when Fury had suffered enough of all of the little temper tantrums Stark Junior was having, she had been allowed to stab him with a really big needle, which, she had to admit, she was more than a little gratified by.

She learned that sometimes it could be fun to be the object of men’s desires, and that sometimes a bit of flirtation was a harmless, if highly amusing, part of social interaction.  Especially, when she was in control.

 

**Steve Rogers**

She first met Steve Rogers about five minutes before everything truly went shit.  Between Barton being compromised, Phil dying and Loki destroying half of New York, she had precious little time to get to a read on him.  He was isolated, that much was obvious, but she found it hard to believe that he was as much of a saint as everyone else seemed to imagine.

When they were first tasked together, it became increasing clear that he was more than capable of taking care of business in a fight, but that he was reticent to deal with the dirtier aspects of their profession.  There was a time she would have called that a weakness, but now… now she saw it as a strength.  Like her, he was built to be a weapon, but hadn’t let it corrupt his sense of values – the same ones she had been lacking until Fury had taken her under his wing.

However, the more time she spent with him, the more apparent his inherent loneliness became.  He made jokes about being the only one of his unit alive, and poked fun at his failure to understand pop culture reference – even though he was slowly getting better at that.  People laughed along with him, and assumed that losing seventy years had not affected him.  Except she knew better, she understood that he was merely toeing the company line because he had yet to be given a better option.

She made it her business to give him a sense of home, to offer him familiarity in a world that must have seemed so strange to him.  Whether was with trips to art exhibits that she had no interest in or her ceaseless instance that he should ask someone out.  She tried her best to ensure that he did not lose his innate goodness, to the bitterness she recognized was bubbling just under the façade he had worked so hard to create.

It made sense that everything descended to hell quicker than anyone had expected, because hadn’t her life always been a complex series of fuck-ups.  Add Steve Rogers – a man who was practically a magnet for all things bad – and things were certain to take a turn for the worse.  And damn, if that boy wasn’t jumping out planes, he was crashing them, she vowed never to fly commercial next to him.

He saved her life, simply because it was the right thing to do, and when she asked whether he believed she would return the favor, he promised that he did… now.  If she’d had the time to process that comment she might have seen it for what it was – a willingness to connect – but in the rush she had only felt a dull sense of resignation.

When all was said and done, when they had both been reassigned to different missions, she kissed him on the cheek and wished him good luck.  Not because she had been ordered to, and not because she had any ulterior motive, but because it had felt like the natural thing to do.

She did not let herself think about what that might mean.

Two weeks later, and half away across the world, he showed up at her hotel in Paris – the one that no one should have known she was staying at.

“Someone told me, I needed to find a date.”  He said simply, looking at her earnestly through impossibly blue eyes, and she tried to ignore the waves that sent through her.

“I don’t deserve you,” she whispered, so much was left unsaid, but she could not explain.  The smile that had been breaking teenage girls’ hearts since the 1940s, sent a chill through her body, but she was used to not feeling.  Or at least, she was trained not to show her feelings.

“You told me I deserve to be happy,” he insisted.  She had said that, but she hadn’t meant for him to come to her, however much she now realized, she had wanted him to.  Despite the realization, she took a few steps back into the sanctuary of her room; her teeth worrying at her bottom lips as she tried keep eye contact with him. 

He made her feel exposed, like she had lost all control, but in all of the best ways.  If she fell, she knew he would catch her.

“I want you,” he said, taking a few steps towards her, his height and breath of his shoulders formidable in their closeness.  The admittance might have been the most sensual thing anything had said to her, simple in its naked honesty, but then her brain conjured the image of his recruitment posters.  She laughed, and though it took him a moment – in which her heart stopped – he realized what he had said, and offered her a small shrug.  The movement spread across her field of vision like an avalanche of pure muscle.  He took another step forward, and all she could see was him.  He placed a remarkably delicate hand to her jaw and cut off what remained of her laugh with a kiss.

It was hardly ideal, too much tongue and not enough control, but she relinquished herself to him.  When he pulled away, he rubbed the pad of his thumb across her cheekbone and devastated her with one smile.  In that moment it didn’t matter that she was not good enough, it didn’t matter that she was defiling a national icon, all that mattered was that he was there.  And she couldn’t help but think about the amount of practice they would have at finding that perfect kiss.

In the end, Steve Rogers taught her what it was like to be human.  And she finally learned how to feel all of those emotions she had played at so many times.


End file.
